Linda Poole

NCAT Regenerative Grazing Specialist
Kaleb Roedel of KUNR Public Radio posted a story that may be of interest to all of us struggling with over-appropriated water rights:

A plan to share the pain of water scarcity divides farmers in this rural Nevada community​

Since the 1960s, state officials had let farmers over-pump the basin-fill aquifer in Diamond Valley, which is mainly recharged by winter storms. Back then, the state appropriated irrigation groundwater rights totaling about 126,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot is the amount of water that fills an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot.

Decades later, however, it was discovered the amount of water available in the valley each year is only 30,000 acre-feet.

As a result, for more than half a century, groundwater levels have dropped by an average of 2 feet every year.

And without water?

“Your land value is zero, you have no livelihood, see you later. So that wasn’t an option for us,” Plaskett said.

Faced with the threat of some farmers losing their access to water entirely while others didn’t feel the scarcity at all, farmers got together in an attempt to shoulder the burden together.

They were able to do that because in 2015 the state declared Diamond Valley a critical management area – Nevada’s only basin with that designation. They had 10 years to put together a groundwater management plan.

If they didn’t succeed, the state could turn off at least half of the farmers' wells to ensure the aquifer didn’t run completely dry. The oldest rights would be protected; the newer ones were vulnerable. The same legal foundation governs how water is managed across most of the Western U.S.

In 2018, after years of negotiations, a groundwater management plan was approved by a majority of the valley’s water users, with a mix of senior and junior water rights, and later green-lit by the state.

Tibbitts said many irrigators in Diamond Valley own both junior and senior rights, and 64% of those with the latter signed onto the plan. The new system required all irrigators to reduce their use, spreading cuts over a 35-year period. By year 5 of the plan, farmers and ranchers, as a whole, have to reduce their groundwater pumping by 15%. By year 10, they’ll have to cut back pumping by 30%.

That’s a drastic change from how most water law functions in the West, according to Philip Womble with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

“The prevailing system for allocating water in the western United States is known as prior appropriation,” Womble said. “And this is a priority-based system where older, more senior water rights get their entire water allocation before newer, more junior water users get any water.

“(Diamond Valley) is the only place where a groundwater system that is only implementing that priority-based water-rights system has transitioned to a different allocation scheme that shares shortage.”

Read or listen to the whole story to learn more about this emerging approach to adapting to water scarcity in the West. It's not without controversy, but it may offer a positive alternative to legal battles and government interventions into how ag water is handled in dry, hot times.


 

Members online

No members online now.
Back
Top